Not yet, is my reply. Who knows if it will in future.
I've done a little bit of exploring while sitting on the Help Desk and thought this was a good topic to kick the blog back into gear. Have a play with it yourselves and see what you think.
BING - http://www.bing.com/
I've added images to this but they don't come out very clearly. Take a test yourselves and see what you think of BING. Add some comments of what you've found.
First complaint.
It's too busy. The search screen has wallpaper. Today on IE is a seaside scene and on Firefox a night city scene.
I've done a little bit of exploring while sitting on the Help Desk and thought this was a good topic to kick the blog back into gear. Have a play with it yourselves and see what you think.
BING - http://www.bing.com/
I've added images to this but they don't come out very clearly. Take a test yourselves and see what you think of BING. Add some comments of what you've found.
First complaint.
It's too busy. The search screen has wallpaper. Today on IE is a seaside scene and on Firefox a night city scene.
I haven't tested BING on my home (very slow connection) computer yet but I suspect that with a busy picture like that BING is going to be a much slower page to load than Google.
Second complaint:
I have a few favourite searches I use to test new search engines. BING doesn't do well on either of them.
I searched for the name of my Hampden property, Kurinui. We have a very old web site which quite a number of people link to (to our embarrassment) and our property gets mentioned on a number of other web sites. There is a school in NZ called Kuranui which some people spell incorrectly.
Bing finds 73 results today, our web site not included. Google finds 572 and our web site comes in tops.
Second complaint:I have a few favourite searches I use to test new search engines. BING doesn't do well on either of them.
I searched for the name of my Hampden property, Kurinui. We have a very old web site which quite a number of people link to (to our embarrassment) and our property gets mentioned on a number of other web sites. There is a school in NZ called Kuranui which some people spell incorrectly.
Bing finds 73 results today, our web site not included. Google finds 572 and our web site comes in tops.
Then I tried an obscure ancestor: "Walter Mowbray Johnston". He appears on a number of genealogy web sites and a couple of Google Books (is it unfair to expect BING to find a Google Book result?)
BING found no results. Google 9.
Google has a wild card function I find very useful. Instead of searching for "walter mowbray johnston" I can search for "walter * johnston". Google replaces the * with any word or character, so I get results of "Walter Lee Johnston" or "Walter H. Johnston". Using the * in a phrase in BING gave me results of "Walter Johnston", no middle name or character.
The help section and advanced sections of BING don't mention wildcards. So I'm guessing they don't have this feature, yet.
Google has a wild card function I find very useful. Instead of searching for "walter mowbray johnston" I can search for "walter * johnston". Google replaces the * with any word or character, so I get results of "Walter Lee Johnston" or "Walter H. Johnston". Using the * in a phrase in BING gave me results of "Walter Johnston", no middle name or character.
The help section and advanced sections of BING don't mention wildcards. So I'm guessing they don't have this feature, yet.
BING has one cool feature in Firefox. Hover over the picture in the main search screen and see what pops up.
1 comment:
I suspect the graphic would load very fast even over dialup. The current graphic is 75.99K.
yes, it is unfair to expect google books results from Google (personally, I'd like a way to filter them OUT).
The rest is interesting. I'm finding similar results, although I don't have a benchmark set of searches. I'm finding it better than any of the other non-google searches but not as good as google itself.
It has one MAJOR advantage though. It doesn't seem to have Googles cookie spyware.
Post a Comment